Management Innovation Group

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Management InnovationGroup

• Can we run the company?
• Victor Lombardi

UPA New York City February 15, 2005
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About Me
Principal, The Management Innovation
GroupPresident, The Information Architecture
InstituteManaged IT or IA people at AIG,
Razorfish, Republic National Bank, Medscape, SCP
Communications, and DDB NeedhamTaught at the
Parsons School of Design
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Im sick and tired
User testing is not where the action is. The
action is with those people who decide what
product to build in the first place. That isnt
the user tester community, but it should be the
CHI community. You know, Im sick and tired of
hearing the CHI community complain that theyre
never listened tothe real important decisions
are made at the top. Those are the people who
will decide what direction youre moving in, what
the time frame is, what the budget will be, where
the emphasis is... and we need more people from
the CHI community to be those executives...to be
making those decisions which will eventually
empower this profession. Look, this field should
not be about usability thats a silly thing.
This field should be about empowering users, and
that decision is made at the executive
level. - Don Norman, Organizational Limits
to HCI
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Empowering People
We can empower people further if we have more
influence in the design of the world.We can
have more influence in the design of the world if
we hold higher positions in organizations.
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Stories
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Karen
Started out Cleaning cages at the local vet,
then Information Architect/WriterNow Executive
Director, User Experience, Razorfish
How? I didnt know that what I was doing was
hard.
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Peter
Started out System Integration TechnicianNow
Findability Guru
How? Serendipity. I discovered a book on careers
in library science while browsing a library.
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Liz
Started out Ice cream scooper, English teacher,
writer, information architectNow Senior
Manager of Product Development
How? I keep finding interesting problems.
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Perry
Started out Editorial AssistantNow Runs her
own integrated marketing firm for higher
education and educational publishing
How? Doing what I love, and focusing on results.
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David
Started out Designer, Senior Designer, Design
Manager, Design DirectorNow Director, Internet
Marketing for a consumer products company
How? My lengthy Internet experience and my MBA.
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Harry
Started out Technical writerNow Web
Communications Architect, Dreamworks Animation
How? I hate computers.
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Camille
Started out Technical writer, then head of a
content development groupNow Owner, The
Slipper Room
How? The years 1997-2001, which gave me ten
years of professional experience.
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Matt
Started out Web producer making teaNow
Design Strategist, Nokia making tea
How? Tea.
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Victor
Started out various IT roles, information
architect, IA managerNow Management consultant
How? I love learning.
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Leaders
Not just alpha males who play golfPositive
attitudesDoing something they loveWilling to
let go of old roles and grow into new ones
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We Should Be Amateurs
In order to be a professional, one must be an
amateur. The word amateur comes from the Latin
amator, meaning to love. An amateur is one who
does something for the love of it. Of course.
Love and passion are the organizing forces in
leadership and management, overriding technique
or skill, just as they are in almost everything
worthwhile doing romance, parenthood,
creativity. Richard Farson, Designers as
Leaders
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Paths Upward
DesignManagement
General Management
Designing Organizations
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Design Management
DesignManagement
Designing Organizations
General Management
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Director of Simplification
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General Management
DesignManagement
General Management
Designing Organizations
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Director, Wireless
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Designing Organizations
Designing Organizations
DesignManagement
General Management
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Reed Hastings, NetFlix
Reed Hastings wanted to empower users of video
rentals, so he started a company (and did an
excellent job).
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Robin Chase, ZipCar
Robin Chase wanted to empower users of rental
cars, so she started a company (and did an
excellent job).
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Sam Farber, OXO
Sam Farber wanted to empower users of housewares,
so he started a company (and did an excellent
job).
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From Designer to Leader
The core competencies of design facilitate
specific and tangible ways of engaging with
problems. These competencies bring new value to
the way in which business teams work. To foster
the broad application of design competence,
designers will need to feel confident in leaving
the designer label behind and accepting the label
of business manager, strategist, or vice
president. Of course, this is no big leap for
the best in any discipline one will find
engineers, accountants, and human resources
professionals at the helms of organizations
around the world. However, at that point, they
are simply called leaders. - Chris Conley,
Leveraging
Designs Core Competencies
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Demystify business fundamentals
it became clear that no matter how grand the
vision, design is managed in the context of
business. So it is critical to understand the
basic forces of accounting, marketing, and
organizational management, because otherwise even
the best designs in the world will go nowhere.
The much-celebrated divide between "designers"
and "suits" is not only counter-productive to
success all around, it's inaccurate. Once you
demystify business fundamentals, they become just
like any other design constraint, and are no more
insurmountable. - Brad Nemer, who recently
earned both Master of Design and Master of
Business Administration degrees from the Illinois
Institute of Technology.
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HBR
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Managing the Professional Service Firm
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Survival of the Savvy
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But Im an introvert.
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But I miss the hands-on work.
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The Artist-Businessperson
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The Designer-Businessperson
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What Do Managers Do?
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What Mangers Really Do
General managers face two fundamental
challenges figuring out what to do despite an
enormous amount of potentially relevant
information, and getting things done through a
large and diverse set of people despite having
little direct control over most of them. To
tackle these challenges, effective general
managers develop flexible agendas and broad
networks of relationships. Their agendas enable
them to react opportunistically to the flow of
events around them because a common framework
guides their decisions about where and when to
intervene. And their networks allow them to have
quick and pointed conversations that give the
general managers influence well beyond their
formal chain of command. - John Kotter, What
Effective General
Mangers Really Do, HBR
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Our Expertise With Uncertainty
But if most organizations have begun to adapt to
the uncertainty of rapid change, most managers
have not. They remain locked into the mechanical
mind-set of the industrial age--that is, they
assume that any management challenge can be
translated into a clearly defined problem for
which an optimal solution can be found. That
approach works in stable markets and even in
markets that change in predictable ways. Today's
markets, however, are increasingly unstable and
unpredictable. Managers can never know precisely
what they're trying to achieve or how best to
achieve it. They can't even define the problem,
much less engineer a solution. For guidance, they
can look to the managers of product design, a
function that has always been fraught with
uncertainty.- Richard K. Lester , Michael J.
Piore , Kamal M. Malek Interpretive Management
What General Managers Can Learn from Design, HBR
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Who Is Managing?
By comparing the top executives of 1980s
Fortune 100 companies with the top brass of firms
in the 2001 list, the authors have quantified a
transformation that until now has been largely
anecdotal. A dramatic shift in executive careers,
and in executives themselves, has occurred over
the past two decades. Todays Fortune 100
executives are younger, more of them are female,
and fewer were educated at elite institutions.
Theyre also making their way to the top more
quickly. Theyre taking fewer jobs along the way,
and they increasingly move from one company to
the next as their careers unfold.- Peter
Cappelli and Monika Hamori The New Road to the
Top, HBR
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Now Is Your Big Chance!
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Meet Them More Than Halfway
The better strategy for designers would be to
regard the current effort to educate the CEO
about how designers see the world as a lost
cause, and instead try to educate themselves on
how the CEO sees the world. - Richard Farson,
Designers as Leaders
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What the CEO Wants You to Know
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How?
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Expanding Our Repertoire
While customer-based innovation is an excellent
way to manage innovation, it is not the only
effective way. Many companies have been extremely
successful without ever studying a customer or
hiring a designer. Some of my clients have
generated literally hundreds of billions of
dollars in revenue without this competency. For
many, the traditional sources of inspiration for
innovation have been technology or a focus on
operational excellence. These sources emphasize
an inwardly-focus inside-out approach to
development, and are capable of generating
competitive advantage. - Darrel Rhea, Bring
Clarity to the
Fuzzy Front End
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Strategy Safari
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Change is Fun!
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Being Comfortable
You cant lead a cavalry charge if you think you
look silly on a horse.
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Taking Initiative X Y
The Bootstrapping Dilemma How to get to Y while
doing X?1) Try to sell a client on Y2) Client
says, No thanks, well just take X. 3) Do
X', but also do the Y' you wanted to (at least
document the concept)4) Go to the next
prospective client and say, "I've done X' and
Y "5) Rinse and repeat
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Business Design
Abductive ThinkingCreativityCollaborationExp
erimentationHonesty
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A Riddle
If a designer designs, but in the end has no
design, what has she designed?
Everyone designs who devises courses of action
aimed at changing existing situations into
preferred ones. - Herbert Simon
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Teach CEOs How to Innovate
Designers are teaching CEOs and managers how to
innovate. They pitch themselves to businesses as
a resource to help with a broad array of issues
that affect strategy and organization, creating
new brands, defining customer experiences,
understanding user needs, changing business
practices. - Bruce Nussbaum, Redesigning
American Business, Business Week, November 2004
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Design Your Career
ResearchExperimentCollaborateInvent
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Research
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Crains Events
http//www.crainsny.com/calendar.cms
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Experiment
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The Unplanned Career
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Collaborate
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Invent
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The End?
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Bio
Victor Lombardi is a principal at The Management
Innovation Group where he helps executives use
design methods to make their products and their
companies more innovative. With extensive
experience in the consulting, information
architecture and IT industries, Victor brings his
clients an integrated view of people,
information, technology and business.For
several years Victor worked in information
technology, building systems at the Boston
Consulting Group, DDB Needham and others. After a
transition into design he engaged in user
research and product design while managing
departments and project teams. His clients come
from a wide span of industries and have included
the Ford Motor Company, J.P. Morgan, Cisco, Sharp
Electronics, and the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Victor has designed over 30 digital media
products working within companies and as a
consultant.Victor currently serves as President
of the Information Architecture Institute, has
taught at the Parsons School of Design and is a
frequent writer and speaker.
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About the Management Innovation Group
The Management Innovation Group (MIG) is a
research group and strategic consultancy. We are
dedicated to improving our clients' ability to
identify, plan for, and adapt to strategic change
by enabling them to more effectively collaborate
across functional units, understand and engage
their customers, and envision the future. Our
principals are leading practitioners of strategic
design, leveraging expertise in human-centered
approaches to leadership, organization design,
product development, and information
architecture. Our work has helped leading
companies, including Yahoo!, Apple, Google, Wells
Fargo, Ford, Cisco, Rolling Stone, and Office
Depot identify deep customer insights, develop
innovative new products and services, and create
effective strategies, teams, and communication
plans.